Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'Right. How do we do that?'

'Just a minute,' said Ellery. 'Let me see.'

Curtis glanced about. Bob Beech was hunched over the computer terminal. Arnon and Birnbaum had one of the building plans spread on the table in front of them and were discussing something with one ear on the latest crisis. Jenny was sitting at Mitch's shoulder watching the laptop screen. At the far end of the table Helen Hussey had laid out a selection of tools and other useful objects as if preparing for surgery. There was a first-aid kit, a carpet knife, a small handsaw, a bevel, a jointer, a rasp, some tin snips, a plasterer's float, a pair of pliers, a shave hook, the scissors, some knives and forks, an assortment of coach-bolts, a couple of screwdrivers, a bottle opener and a large wrench.

Curtis selected one of the screwdrivers.

'Where in hell did you find that lot?' Curtis asked, impressed with her resourcefulness.

'You'd be surprised what builders leave lying around a new building,' she said. 'There was a whole bag of tools in the ladies' washroom, of all places.'

'Yeah, well, you'd better keep out of the washrooms from now on," said Curtis, raising his voice. 'All of you. Abraham just killed Levine in the men's room. And now Nat's stuck in there.'

'My God.'

'Do you have a monkey wrench there, Helen?' asked Ellery.

She had never liked Tony Levine. Always trying to come on to her. He was worse than Warren Aikman. But she was sorry he was dead. With a shock she realized she had already lost count of the number of people who had died in the Gridiron since the late afternoon.

'I don't know,' she said vaguely, and held up something she thought might fit the description.

'Even better,' said Ellery excitedly. That's a Stillson.'

-###-

When the water started to pour into the washroom Coleman was almost relieved, for it was neither hot nor did it seem to contain ammonia. But with each minute that passed the level began to increase. By the time Curtis was back on the other side of the door, it was several inches deep. Coleman might have tried to stop the flow except that the water was pouring into the washroom from every conceivable entry point: from high-pressure sprinklers on the ceiling, from the faucets on the sink, even from the cisterns behind the toilets. The idea that Abraham intended that he should drown was beginning to seep slowly through the policeman's imagination.

'Got a fuckin' leak in here, Frank,' he yelled. 'Place is filling up with water. No ammonia. Maybe Abraham changed his mind about the cleansing program after I hit his voice box.'

This gave Coleman an idea. Once again he drew his gun.

'Hey, Frank,' he yelled. 'Stand away from the door. I'm going to try and blast a few holes in the door. I reckon I'm going to need some help with the drainage in here before very long. Frank?'

'Ah, that's a negative, Nat,' shouted Curtis. 'I've just been told that the door's made of steel. You'd need a fifty calibre BMG to get through this. Just try and take it easy. We've got something going here. A way of disconnecting the whole bathroom module from the mains supply of water.'

'OK, Frank, Whatever you say. But don't leave it too long. I never did like any of those submarine pictures.'

Coleman holstered his gun and, with the water nearly up to his knees, sat down on the toilet again.

Bending forwards he scooped some of the water into his hands and drank it.

'I guess I won't die of thirst anyway.'

-###-

Curtis released the last of the self-tapping screws and let the panel fall off the wall and on to the floor. In the recessed space were a large red elbow-shaped pipe, a smaller branch pipe connecting the washroom, a couple of ceramic disc valves and, inside a mineral insulated square box, the electrical trunking that controlled the operation of the washroom. Willis Ellery pointed to a joint on the branch pipe and said, 'I think all we have to do to turn off the mains water is tighten this.'

'Hold on a second,' said Curtis. 'Is this pipe going to be safe to touch?

What about all that electrical stuff in there? Suppose Abraham's got the pipe wired to the fucking mains electricity?'

'He's got a point, Will,' said Mitch, already keying the code number that was printed on the box cover on to his laptop. 'WSPC 21. The wiring diagram might even show us how to open the door.'

The pull-down menu on the screen asked which version of the wiring instructions he required, Quick or Technical. Mitch chose Quick and watched as the Intergraph programme sketched out a line for each cable instead of a line for every wire.

Willis Ellery leaned across his shoulder and studied the diagram for a minute or two.

'None of the pipes is connected to the electricity supply,' he said at last. Then, beating the palm of his hand with the Stillson pipe wrench, he added, 'Well, here goes,' and prepared to try and close off the water. Adjusting the serrated jaws of the Stillson to fit the joint around the branch pipe, he began to tighten the screw.

'Seems safe enough so far.'

Mitch was reading the wiring diagram. Curtis was looking over his shoulder.

'What is that thing?'

'Washroom Patching Services Cabinet Number 21,' said Mitch. 'Cables for each type of building service. This one's illumination. Downlight and uplighting. This one's HVAC. This one's IT- basic telecommunications requirement and low speed data. It looks as if the door is handled by the HVAC cable. You see? The tray in the ceiling above the door and these two vertical poles either side. If we uncouple this one then the door ought to open.'

'Kind of stiff,' grunted Ellery and, releasing the wrench for a moment, spat on his hands. 'God, I hope this works.'

'What's this cable here?' Mitch asked himself. 'FSS. ESS. What's that?

This one goes to the wall surrounding that branch pipe.'

He flicked the cursor arrow to the top of the screen and pulled down the Glossary.

'Fire Stop Sleeve. Earthquake Stop Sleeve.'

Mitch frowned. 'I guess if this pipe moves within the sleeve then it makes… Willis, no!'

Willis Ellery never heard Mitch.

As he pushed the Stillson wrench against the joint, the smart pipe shifted within the specially designed stop sleeve, making contact with the piezoelectric metal actuator that warned Abraham to stiffen the exterior perimeter's steel frame against seismic shock.

Willis Ellery let out a scream that was a mixture of pain and surprise. Like any human body he made an excellent conductor of electricity, producing as good a reaction as any electrolyte solution. It was not a particularly high current that electrocuted him, just the standard current alternating at sixty cycles per second. But Ellery's hands had been damp with spit and sweat, and when the power hit him it was impossible for him to release his grip on the Stillson and break the passage of the current. It was as if the electricity that gripped him did so with the serrated strength of the Stillson itself. The Stillson gripped the joint; and electricity gripped the Stillson; and Willis Ellery could do nothing but stand there and hold on, shaking up and down, screaming like an hysterical child.

Seeing Mitch reach for Ellery's arm, Curtis struck him aside with a blow of his fist.

'Don't touch him!' he yelled. 'You'll be electrocuted too.'

Ellery uttered a feeble cry as he tried desperately to release his grip on the wrench. 'Ple-e-ease!' he screamed. 'He-elp me-eee!'

'We have to find something non-conductive to pull him off,' shouted Curtis. 'A brush handle, or a length of rope. Hurry!'

He ran back to the kitchen and surveyed the area. There was nothing that looked as if it might not conduct the electricity from Ellery's body into the hands of his rescuers. Then he had an idea. The kitchen table. Sweeping everything off the wooden surface on to the floor he yelled to Mitch, 'Here, we'll use this.'

'Well, thanks a lot,' protested Marty Birnbaum. 'I just sorted out our supplies on that.'

Ignoring him, Curtis and Mitch picked up the table and carried it into the corridor where Ellery was still in the grip of the electrified wrench and now only just conscious of what was happening. There was a strong smell of burning in the air. Like singed hair in a barber's shop. Curtis flung the table over on to its side.

'Slide it into him,' he said, 'like a cow-catcher.' Both men took hold of a table leg and pushed it hard into Ellery's jerking body, forcing him away from the Patching Cabinet. As his grip on the wrench was broken, Ellery yelped with pain and one of his thumbs emitted a blue flash that disappeared into the carpet with a puff of acrid smoke. The combined force of the electricity discharging itself from his body and the table ramming into his side was enough to fling him across the corridor, where he collided with the wall and collapsed unconscious on to the floor.

Curtis was on him in a second, like some unsporting wrestler, flipping the man on to his back, tearing open his shirt front and pressing his ear against his chest. 'Is he dead?' said Helen.

Straddling Ellery's thighs, Curtis said nothing and, placing one hand over the other, with elbows locked, he began to press Ellery's heart between his breastbone and spine, trying to find a rhythm in his chest compression that would squirt enough blood out of it to supply the unconscious man's brain.

'Helen,' he said breathlessly, 'find out if Nat's OK. Jenny? Get a blanket, a table cloth, something to keep this man warm. Mitch, call Richardson on the walkie-talkie and let him know what's happening.'

Curtis kept up the compression for another couple of minutes and then leaned forwards, listening for a heartbeat. He shook his head and started to undo Ellery's urine-soaked pants. Jenny returned with a table cloth.

'Pull these down,' he yelled, 'and get a hold of his femoral artery.'

He started the compressions again. Jenny pulled Ellery's pants down. Ignoring the stink of urine, she pushed the scrotum in Ellery's underpants to one side and let her fingers reach for his groin.

'Can you feel it yet?' he grunted. 'Can you feel it when I press his chest?'

'Yes,' she said after a momentary pause. 'I can feel it.'

'That's good. Someone find out what that asshole Beech is doing. Has he managed to pull the plug on this son of a bitch yet?'

Curtis put his ear to Ellery's chest and listened again. This time he heard a feeble heartbeat. The bigger problem was that Willis Ellery's respiratory muscles had seized up and his breathing had not yet restarted.

'You can let go of his crotch now,' he told Jenny. 'Did you speak to Nat?' he asked Helen.

Kneeling by Ellery's side, he pinched the man's nose and started to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration.

'Nat's OK,' Helen told Curtis. 'The water's up to his waist and rising, but he's OK.'

With his mouth pressed periodically to Ellery's there was no time for Curtis to answer her. Not that he had much to say. He told himself he was all out of good ideas. There were no options left that he could think of. It was all down to Beech now.

Ten minutes passed and still Curtis did not give up on Willis Ellery. One of the things he had learned as a young patrolman was that victims often died because the person attempting to resuscitate them gave up too quickly. He knew he just had to keep going. But he was already tiring. He knew he was going to need help.

Between forcing breaths into Ellery's traumatized lungs, Curtis asked Jenny if she could take over for a while. Covering Ellery with the table cloth, she looked at Curtis with tears in her eyes and nodded.

'You know how?'

'I took a first-aid course in college,' she said, and moved alongside Ellery's head.

'Don't give up until I tell you,' he ordered. 'There's the danger of anoxia. Suspended respiration might cause blindness, deafness, palsy, you name it.' But it was plain to see that Jenny would keep going for as long as it took. Curtis stood up stiffly and watched her carry on. Then he went to speak to Beech.

-###-

Bob Beech was worried.

The last time he had felt so worried had been in the middle of the 1980s, on his graduate course in computer security at Caltech, when he had constructed his first self-replicating program or, as he had subsequently learned to call all such SRPs, a computer virus. In those days everyone had been writing them, inspired by an article that had appeared in Scientific American.

With three hundred lines of MS-DOS Beech had created TOR, after Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Beech's idea had been to create a program that would destroy the heresy of pirated MS-DOS software in the Far East, where software piracy was almost endemic, and then to sell the successful result to the Microsoft Corporation. The trouble was that TOR had behaved more like a real computer virus than Beech had ever anticipated and had combined with another virus, NADIR, the existence of which Beech had been quite unaware, to create a new superstrain of virus, later known as

TORNADO. This mutation had acted with catastrophic effects,

destroying not just data written with pirated Microsoft product, but data written with legitimate software too. At the second A-life conference in 1990 at Los Alamos, Beech had heard one delegate estimate the cost of the damage wreaked by TORNADO to be several billion dollars.

Beech had never told anyone that he was the author of TOR. It was his darkest secret. Ten years on, with numerous TORNADO anti-viral programs still on the market, fifth- and sixth-generation mutations of TORNADO continued to survive inside PCs all over the world. He had written a few anti-viral programs himself, one of them for TORNADO, and reckoned he knew as much about disassembling rogue SRPs as anyone.

GABRIEL was the most sophisticated disassembly program — ever since TOR he had disliked the term 'computer virus' — Beech had ever written, based on principles he had learned from epidemiology and biological virology. As a piece of livewire it was, Beech considered, a real bastard. Not only was GABRIEL designed to be completely autonomous, it was also supposed to be extremely aggressive to the infected host. Except for the circumstances in which he now came to trigger GABRIEL, Bob Beech might have been proud of his disassembly program. The only fly in the ointment was that it did not work.

GABRIEL was, as he had told Frank Curtis it would be, slow acting, but even after a few minutes Beech knew that he ought to have seen some sign that GABRIEL was having the desired effect on Abraham's architecture. But there was nothing to indicate that Abraham had suffered so much as a minor thrash, stray, bozo, hung file or line gremlin. Beech had positioned himself at a vantage point within the system-architecture where, like some epidemiologist staring at the progress of a virus under an electron microscope, he ought to have been able to witness Abraham in the very earliest stages of the infection: the clock. GABRIEL had been designed to destroy Abraham's sense of time first of all. As the minutes rolled by on the clock it was plain to see that the DP was inoperative. It was now eleven-fifteen and Abraham was still behaving like the blue-ribbon program Beech had helped to create, with no errors and no bugs. Plainly GABRIEL was impotent, at least as far as Abraham was concerned.